Eric Ellingsen is an artist, poet, teacher, and landscape practitioner whose work connects poetry, walking, public space, translation, performance, experimental pedagogy, and collective perception. He founded the landscape art practice Species of Space and teaches in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
From 2009 to 2014, Ellingsen co-directed and taught at the Institute for Spatial Experiments, an education project initiated by Olafur Eliasson and affiliated with the Berlin University of the Arts. His work has since developed through exhibitions, walks, public installations, poetry, collaborative research, and site-specific teaching.
The people called Endless
The sequence is organized around returns: starting over, trying again, repeating phrases, revising goals, and confronting the difficulty of a final decision. Sentences accumulate through fragments, parentheses, lists, jokes, philosophical references, and abrupt tonal shifts.
Its repeated insistence on “again” turns recurrence into subject and form. Language becomes a spatial field through which the poem moves, circling desire, politics, uncertainty, and the problem of continuation.
Halvard Johnson’s formal variations offer a neighboring example of recurrence generating new meaning through altered context.
Recurrence and space
Repetition changes when it happens in space. A route walked twice reveals different details; a sentence repeated in another context acquires another pressure; a public square changes according to who occupies it and when.
Ellingsen’s poetry and landscape practice share this sensitivity to repeated encounter. Space becomes legible through movement and return.
The poem therefore behaves like a walk whose route crosses familiar territory while attention keeps changing.
Species of Space
Ellingsen founded Species of Space as a platform for landscape art and research. The practice develops site-specific work through walking, drawing, storytelling, public installation, ecological attention, and experiments in how people perceive and use shared environments.
The name suggests several kinds of spatial experience. A room, path, street, field, institution, poem, or social situation can each function as a distinct “species” whose properties influence behavior.
This spatial practice gives Ellingsen’s poetry an unusual context. Words, paths, bodies, buildings, images, and public situations can all function as compositional materials.
Walking as method
Walking produces knowledge through bodily movement. Distance becomes duration; scale becomes physical; surfaces, sounds, and obstacles are encountered directly.
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s walking-based writing offers a neighboring practice in which urban movement generates sequence, observation, conversation, and literary form.
For Ellingsen, walking can also become research. A route reveals who can move through a space, where barriers exist, how environments are maintained, and which stories remain visible.
Public space
Public space is shaped by design and by the people who use it. Benches, paths, signs, lighting, property boundaries, vegetation, transit, and surveillance influence how bodies move and gather.
Ellingsen’s projects treat these features as materials for collective imagination. A public installation or guided walk can make familiar spatial rules visible and invite participants to experience the environment differently.
Rex Leonowicz’s poetry of bodies and public space provides another perspective on how streets, transit, parks, and gathering places carry social histories and unequal experiences of belonging.
Translation and Ethiopian collaboration
Ellingsen has worked in long-term collaboration with Ethiopian poets, musicians, and artists. Projects connected with the Institute for Spatial Experiments brought together poetry, jazz, visual art, translation, and performance across Addis Ababa and Berlin.
He has also collaborated on English translations of Ethiopian poetry, including work by Mihret Kebede. Translation becomes part of a wider practice of listening across disciplines and cultural contexts.
Aaron Crippen’s translation practice offers a neighboring example of poetry shaped through close attention to another language, literary tradition, and cultural field.
Translation as spatial practice
Translation creates movement between linguistic environments. A phrase leaves one system of grammar, sound, and cultural reference and enters another.
The translator has to build relations across that distance, making decisions about rhythm, image, idiom, and what kind of unfamiliarity should remain visible.
For Ellingsen, this process fits naturally with landscape thinking. Translation and spatial practice both depend on orientation, relation, and the negotiation of difference.
Performance and collective perception
Performance changes public space through temporary attention. A reading, walk, musical event, or collaborative action gathers participants into a shared duration.
That gathering can alter how the place is perceived afterward. A street or room acquires memory through what happened there.
Hazel Smith’s intermedia performance practice offers another route into poetry crossing sound, image, collaboration, and public presentation.
Experimental pedagogy
Ellingsen’s teaching emphasizes collective imagination, perception, action-based research, and the creation of new languages for describing and shaping public space.
Experimental pedagogy treats learning as an event whose structure can be redesigned. Walking, making, observing, performing, and discussing become methods of inquiry alongside reading and writing.
This gives teaching a creative dimension and makes education part of Ellingsen’s broader artistic practice.
Landscape as language
Landscape can be read through repeated forms: paths, edges, plantings, walls, signs, views, and the movement of bodies. These elements create patterns that influence interpretation.
Ellingsen’s work asks how those patterns can be revised through attention and collective action. The built and natural environment becomes something people read and continually rewrite through use.
This gives him a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry and interdisciplinary art, where language, environment, performance, translation, and public space form one connected field of perception. Readers can also continue through the wider field of contemporary poets working across landscape, walking, translation, performance, pedagogy, and public space.